He thought he knew pain. On the streets, as the son of the cheapest whore in town, when he had to steal and do all sorts of shady business just to get some food in his belly, but even then he had better morals than most of the people who lived on the shitty part of town. Then he had been Robin, the Batman's sidekick, and he dished more hits than he took, but he still took some serious pain. Than when the Joker got a hold of him, beat him for hours with that damn crow bar before he blew the whole warehouse up with him still inside. He had died only to come back and have to dig himself out of his own grave, to find out the Clown was still alive and well, and the Batman had gotten the Replacement. Than there had been that time where the drug-dealers he had ripped off managed to drug him and it was a few days before he could escape, even then it had been a month before he could actually function on the level needed when fighting crime. He thought he knew pain, but none of that could even measure up to a fraction of what he was feeling now, what he had been feeling for nearly a month.
The man who had been torturing him for the last month, had said he was Dr. Hugo Strange, which Jason knew was a lie because he had put that bastard away a dozen times and he would have recognized him on sight. If Jason weren't in so much pain he might have admired his kidnappers for their cunning, they grabbed him when he was taking a break from his late nights gallivanting. Bruce was off-world for the Justice League, Tim the Replacement was at some rich kid boarding school, and Dick was on a short vacation with Roy to the Caribbean Islands, Babs was currently trying to pretend like he didn't existed after an incident a few months back where he hacked her systems, and he was pretty sure the other girls of the Bat family where on some case involving the Yakuza in Asia. So the entire bat family was out of the picture, and he had just gotten several drug dealers arrested, so most of his buddies on the bad side of the law would probably say he deserved what he got.
He might have been able to handle the torture, if it hadn't been for the fact that the very first day, his captor had pumped him full of some drugs he hadn't even heard of. So not only could he not pass out and get a few hours rest, but it was like every nerve in his body was ultra sensitive, he couldn't even get himself into a good trans. The first week he had managed to lock his jaw and endure, but by the secant week, he was so thirsty, and when the man put a hot branding iron to his back, again and again, he screamed till his throat gave out. By the end of the secant week, he was so relieved, because he still hurt, but he knew he only had a few hours before he died from malnutrition, because he hadn't eaten anything, he wasn't even sure if he could.
He had felt himself weaken to the point that he thought any secant he would drop off, and that's when his kidnapper hooked him up to an ivy, and he was sure if he hadn't been dehydrated, he would have cried. The next day, when his kidnapper came down for the daily torture ritual, instead of reaching for one of the hundreds of torture devises on the far wall, he pulled a chair over just a few feet in front of Jason and had a seat. Jason at this point had given up struggling to escape, even with the ivy, he didn't have the energy, and the first week he had dislocated both his arms and broke both his thumbs attempting to escape. He had been stripped down to nothing but his skin when he first woke up, so he didn't have anything he could use as a lock pick, he had even tried to used his torturer as a means of escape but he always stayed just out of arms reach, but close enough he could still catch him with a knife.
He knew he had already reached his breaking point, and he was guessing his kidnapper knew it to. The man sat down and pulled a little notebook from his breast-pocket and asked, "Jason, how did you come back from the dead?"
Jason knew he had already reached his breaking point, but that question sent him truly over the edge. He wasn't sure who was more surprised by his reaction, his Captor or him, when he started laughing. Laughter that would put the Joker to shame it was so manic. After a few minutes the man sighed and said, "I was certain I had broken you, perhaps a few more days."
Jason slowly stopped laughing and asked, "Do you believe in Hell?"
The man frowned and pushed up his glasses, the kind with the round lenses, and said, "I don't think whether I believe in God has anything to do with ever-lasting life."
Jason let out a little laugh and said, "God? Who said anything about God? No I asked whether you believe in hell."
The man frowned and asked, "What are you getting at?"
Jason said, "You want to know how I came back or not?"
The man narrowed his eyes and said, "My superiors do, yes. Very well, I suppose I do believe in hell? What does that have to do with your resurrection?"
Jason leaned as far forward as he could and said, "I may have done many bad things but when I died, I still had innocent eyes."
The man pursed his lips, like he was going to object, but Jason said, "Look into my eyes, and tell me you don't believe me, tell me I don't have innocent eyes."
The man seemed to be on the verge of walking out, but something in Jason's tone must have swayed him because he took off his glasses and stood so he was at Jason's height, and for the first time he looked Jason directly into those sweet baby blues… only when he did look, they weren't blue.
Everything was blurry, with red around the edges, and he wasn't even sure if he could see his hand when he waved it in front of his face. He wasn't exactly sure how he had gotten out, or how he had gotten the rags he was wearing, he wasn't even sure how he was even standing. He was hurting, so even though he knew all the bats where away and even though he hadn't been there since before he died, he went to the one place he had ever called home, Wayne Manor.
He couldn't see, but his other senses where going into overdrive. Finally he wandered to a street that had the familiar stink of a certain Vendor that sold every food you could think to put on a stick, from pickles to corndogs to catfish. From there it was a few miles uphill to Wayne Manor. He didn't know what he was expecting when he opened the front door with the key he had hidden in the front paneling, but he hadn't expected to be greeted with a shocked, "Master Jason!"
He didn't know why he was so surprised to hear Alfred's voice, but that was all it took for him to finally let go, and he collapsed right there in the entrance hall.